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PR
is hard. And expensive. Most of the time, you get nothing out of it.
And when your company finally is mentioned in an article, even in a big
publication, the results can be disappointing. Like that time when we
got a whooping 169 visitors after getting intoZDNet.

Over
the past two years, I’ve made a lot of PR mistakes. I’ve also got
Bitrix24 into Forbes, VentureBeat, ReadWrite, PCWorld, PCMag,
TechRepublic, CIO, ITWorld and 200+ other tech publications. I’ve
learned that what you do with the article AFTER it’s published is
frequently a lot more important than what do you before. And I am happy
to share my insights with you.

1.Pay for LinkedIn Inmail.

LinkedIn
Inmail is the cheapest and most effective way to pitch journalists. My
account cost me $100 a month and at least 50% of all mentions of
Bitrix24 in the press are results of LinkedIn pitches. The most amazing
thing about LinkedIn is that once you find one or two journalists, their
network will actually show you who else to contact –editors in the same
or other publications. It saves you a lot of time. Also with Inmail the
results are guaranteed, you pay only for those messages that got read
by their recipients.2.Contributors are better than editors.

Publishing
industry is about pageviews – that’s how advertising is sold. To get
pageviews, you need content. To get content, you need to pay
journalists. That’s exactly why a lot of publications now - we are
talking about Forbes, Entreperneur or Inc here – have
blogger/contributor sections. Free content. Your competition and
traditional PR agencies are pitching editors, who receive dozens, if not
hundreds of proposals every day. My personal experience suggests that
contributors and experts are actually much better ‘targets’.

3.Twitter stalking

After
you get to know most editors who cover your niche, you should start
following their Twitter accounts. When you see a tweet that you can
meaningfully respond to or comment on, do so. If you consistently
comment and retweet someone’s account for 2-3 months, they’ll start
noticing. Now you can pitch. Hint – the best way to do this is with a
question.

4.Pitch in multiple formats.

The
same data can be presented in multiple formats – report, infographics,
slideshare presentation, webinar, video and so on. Last Christmas we did
a report about social intranet use. We first pitched it as a study that
got picked up by major tech publications, likeReadWrite. We then releasedinfographicsbased
on the same data and got a score of mentions again. I now know that I
should also include podcast and videocast friendly materials in my
pitches (you can’t easily show infographics in a podcast, and podcasters
are almost universally overlooked).

5.Content amplification (free).

We’ve got mentioned in Forbes twice, both times by contributors.One articlehad 50,000+ views within the first week.Another onegot
less than 2500 views in the same period of time. Why the difference?
Reddit and StumbleUpon. Your corporate Twitter and Facebook are a given.
Make sure you submit articles that mention your product or service to
Digg, Reddit, Delicious and other free content amplification tools to
drive more traffic to them. You won’t always have 100% success rate, but
when your articles get picked up by Reddit or StumbleUpon, the results
are amazing.

6.Content amplification (paid)

If you can’t get your content amplified for free, don’t worry, there are services likeOutbrain(what we use) orTaboolathat
let buy amplification. There are several instances when using them
makes sense. Some publications rank articles according to pageviews. By
driving traffic to your article, you get more pageviews, ranking it
higher. Another instance is when your old article got tapped out and is
buried so deep no one can see it.

7.SEO

Let’s
face it – Google likes Forbes.com a lot better than your site or ours.
You can use that to your advantage. For hypercompetitive phrases like
‘productivity tools’ or ‘collaboration tools’ where our own website has
no chance of getting to the front page results, we use SEO (links with
anchor text and social media mentions) to improve ranking of articles
that mention Bitrix24. Not only it’s easier to improve SERP results for
high authority domain, people trust publications a lot more than vendors
sites.

8.Giveaways

When
we launched the service, we decided to make it free to startups for a
year but journalists weren’t interested in covering this. So we changed
our PR pitch toBitrix24 announces $1.2 million grant program for startups.
Than minor tweak made all the difference. We also routinely partner
with other publications for giveaways (last time we raffled awayParrot AR.Droneto
TWN readers). Many publications are happy to promote your giveaways for
free, some charge sponsored post free, but the advantage of giveaways
is that you can run them all year around, and not wait for a new release
or major product update to contact editors.

9.Lists

There
are two ways to get onto lists. First way is to find a year old article
and contact the author, asking if he or she is planning an update.
That’s how we got onto PCMag’sBest Free Web Appslist. Another way is to hire a guest blogger to write and place a list for you in a blog that accepts such posts (see9 Best Free Business Productivity Tools For Startups), I highly recommend Maricel Rivera ofSourcingPen.comfor
the job. The best thing about them is that lists beget lists. When I
see our service mentioned on a list that I did not solicit, most of the
time I know which older list was used as an inspiration.

10.Promote others

I
try to mention as many other tools and services when promoting Bitrix24
as possible (lists make this easy). Even when these services partially
compete with us. Most social media managers are very happy to retweet
any article that mentions their brand. A lot of time they’ll link to the
article from their website or social media pages too. Hey, the more
qualified traffic, the better.

There
are actually a lot more techniques that we used to improve Bitrix24
visibility and drive traffic to our website. And we’ve increased our ROI
by a lot more than 10X after we dumped our last PR agency. Unless we
are running a big promotion, our PR related expenses are around $500 a
month, and we get 10-20 new articles mentioning Bitrix24 during a
typical 30 day period. Our last agency cost us $7000 a month and
delivered no results.

If
you want ‘predictable’ and affordable PR, here’s what you have to do.
First, contact journalists directly via social media with short pitches,
not press-releases, and try developing relationships with them over
time. Second, keep looking for new formats, because you aren’t Google
and nobody cares about your new release. Third, develop a solid post
publication strategy to squeeze out as much traffic from each article as
possible. Finally, concentrate on ‘grassroot PR’ activities that
improve your chances of being mentioned in media, without you pitching
them directly.